FF Oxide Solid

FF Oxide began its life as a font named after a number: 5608. During his senior year of college, Christian Schwartz worked for a clothing company, designing t-shirts and labels. The aesthetic of one of the lines was a mix of industrial and military, so a lot of stencil type was used. He bought some stencils at a hardware store and digitized this face because other companies kept ripping off the prints they designed using readily available fonts. He liked this particular set of stencils because the letters were designed to have as few stencil breaks as possible, making the stencil effect a lot more subtle than usual. 5608 Walnut Street was their address, and the inspiration for the name of the font.

In 2005, Schwartz expanded this family and released it as part of the FontFont library. FF Oxide Solid and FF Oxide Stencil are two families, each with variants in Light, Regular and Bold weights. The Solid styles are interesting – they look like a naive cousin to Bank Gothic.

The typeface’s final name comes from the chemical composition of rust, since FF Oxide has an unvarnished industrial aesthetic.